Oscar-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore’s vintage TV series “Il Camorrista,” starring Ben Gazzara as one of the fiercest bosses of the Neapolitan Camorra crime syndicate, is being unearthed from the vault 37 years after the mobster himself quashed the show before it aired.
“Il Camorrista” was shot in 1985 as part of an innovative production mounted by Italy’s glorious Titanus shingle and Silvio Berlusconi’s ReteItalia. The production comprised both a Tornatore feature film by the same title and the five-episode TV show.
The “Il Camorrista” movie, which was Tornatore’s first feature, was briefly released locally in 1986 by Titanus before being pulled from Italian cinemas after lawyers for convicted mobster Raffaele Cutolo – considered one of Italy’s most brutal bosses who ruled over as many as 10,000 Camorra affiliates from his jail cell – reportedly sued both production companies for libel. Though Cutolo is not referred to by name, “Il Camorrista” is clearly based on his character and story.
The movie was subsequently rereleased in theaters, but the TV series was shelved. Cutolo died in 2021.
Now, after a meticulous restoration and repackaging operation supervised by Tornatore, Episodes 1 and 4 of “Il Camorrista” are being unveiled for the first time on Thursday at the Rome Film Fest, where the director will also hold a masterclass.
Italy’s Minerva Pictures has closed a deal with Titanus to sell the vintage Tornatore show internationally.
“The fate of my first film, ‘Il Camorrista’ is an odd one,” Tornatore said in a statement.“In order to make it, producer Goffredo Lombardo, who headed Titanus, proposed that I also make a serialised version for television. He took a gamble that was ahead of its time, since in 1985 the [TV] series fever was still far away. But thanks to Lombardo’s foresight we obtained the budget to carry out this project.”
“Unfortunately, the film did not have an easy life due to the burning issues it dealt with and [it] disappeared from circulation a few weeks after its release in cinemas,” Tornatore added. “Discouraged, the distributors never aired the television series, and the five episodes were lost in their 35mm reel warehouses.”
The director goes on to say that almost 40 years later, thanks to a revamp of the glorious Titanus brand, the five episodes have “re-emerged from the shadows” and Guido Lombardo [Goffredo Lombardo’s son], together with the company’s new managers, “asked me to restore and re-edit them.”
That process involved a new 4K scan of the original, an innovative colour correction, a remake of the mono sound reconverted to 5.1, and the resize to 16:9 format from the 1:33 ratio original. The editing remained intact but with some snips made by Tornatore to shorten the duration of each episode to approximately 55 minutes. “Going back to work on a project that I created when I was a young man was a real thrill, because I found in it all the commitment and enthusiasm that made me embrace the profession of cinema,” he said.
“When you watch this series you realise that at 28 Tornatore was already a genius,” said Minerva Pictures chief Gianluca Curti, noting that “he did Italian genre with an auteur sensibility that the others don’t just have.”
Curti informally kicked off sales of the “Il Camorrista” series at the Rome MIA market and Mipcom, and is is now taking the show to the AFM.
